Encyclopedia of the

Post–cold War Policy - Isolating and punishing "rogue"
states

American foreign policymakers used the terms "rogue,"
"outlaw," and "backlash" states virtually
interchangeably after the Cold War. As early as July 1985, President
Reagan had asserted that "we are not going to tolerate …
attacks from outlaw states by the strangest collection of misfits, loony
tunes, and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third
Reich," but it fell to the Clinton administration to elaborate
this concept.

Writing in the March–April 1994 issue of
Foreign Affairs,
Anthony Lake cited "the reality of recalcitrant and outlaw
states that not only choose to remain outside the family [of democratic
nations] but also assault its basic values." He applied this
label to five regimes: Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya and
claimed that their behavior was frequently aggressive and defiant; that
ties among them were growing; that they were ruled by coercive cliques
that suppressed human rights and promoted radical ideologies; that they
"exhibited a chronic inability to engage constructively with the
outside world"; and that their siege mentality had led them to
attempt to develop weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery
systems. For Lake, "as the sole super-power, the United States
[had] a special responsibility … to neutralize, contain and,
through selective pressure, perhaps eventually transform" these
miscreants into good global citizens.

The first Bush administration had agreed with Lake's analysis and
in 1991 adopted a "twowar" strategy designed to enable
U.S. forces to fight and win two regional wars simultaneously against
"renegade" nations. The second Bush administration
emphasized the urgent need to develop a national missile defense to
protect the United States from weapons launched by rogue states. In
short, the "outlaw" nation theme pervaded U.S. foreign
policy throughout the post–Cold War era.

Critics seized on these terms as inherently fuzzy, subjective, and
difficult to translate into consistent policy. Although Lake had defined
rogues as nations that challenged the system of international norms and
international order, disagreement existed about the very nature of this
system. For example, whereas the Organization for European Security and
Cooperation (OSCE) and UN Secretary-General Annan advocated
international norms that would expose regimes that mistreated their
populations to condemnation and even armed intervention, others argued
that such norms would trample on the traditional notion of state
sovereignty. Nevertheless, the State Department sometimes included
Serbia on its outlaw list solely because President Milosevic had
violated the rights of some of his nation's citizens, and NATO
undertook an air war against him in 1999 because of his repression of an
internal ethnic group.

In theory, at least, to be classified as a rogue, a state had to commit
four transgressions: pursue weapons of mass destruction, support
terrorism, severely abuse its own citizens, and stridently criticize the
United States. Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Libya all behaved in this
manner during at least some of the post–Cold War era. Yet the
inclusion of Cuba, which certainly violated human rights and castigated
the United States, was put on the list solely because of the political
influence of the American Cuban community and specifically that of the
Cuban American National Foundation. Moreover, in 1992 Congress approved
the Cuban Democracy Act, which mandated secondary sanctions against
foreign companies who used property seized from Americans by the Castro
government in the 1960s. Attempts to implement this law outraged some of
Washington's closest allies, and President Clinton, while backing
this legislation as a presidential candidate, tried hard to avoid
enforcing it. On the other hand, states like Syria and Pakistan, hardly
paragons of rectitude, avoided being added to the list because the
United States hoped that Damascus could play a constructive role in the
Arab-Israeli "peace process," and because Washington had
long maintained close relations with Islamabad—a vestige of the
Cold War.

The United States employed several tools to isolate and punish rogue
states. Tough unilateral economic sanctions, often at congressional
behest, were imposed on or tightened against Iran, Libya, Cuba, Sudan,
and Afghanistan. Air-power was used massively against Serbia in 1999 and
selectively against Iraq for years after the conclusion of the Gulf War
in 1991. Cruise missiles were fired at Afghanistan and Sudan in
retaliation for terrorist attacks against U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in September 1998. The Central Intelligence Agency supported a
variety of covert actions designed to depose Saddam Hussein, while
Congress approved the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 aimed at providing
Iraqi opposition groups with increased financial assistance. Several
leading Republicans who would occupy high positions in the George W.
Bush administration publicly urged President Clinton in February 1998 to
recognize the Iraqi National Congress (INC) as the provisional
government of Iraq. Some of these critics, including Paul Wolfowitz and
Robert Zoellick, hinted that U.S. ground forces might ultimately be
required to help the INC oust Saddam. In all of these anti-rogue
efforts, however, Washington found it exceedingly difficult to persuade
other nations (with the partial exception of Britain) to support its
policies of ostracism and punishment.

In light of these difficulties, some observers suggested that the United
States drop its "one size fits all" containment strategy
that allegedly limited diplomatic flexibility in favor of a more
differentiated approach that addressed the particular conditions in each
targeted nation. Indeed, the Clinton administration adopted this policy
alternative with North Korea and, to a lesser degree, with Iran. Faced
with the dangers posed by Pyongyang's ongoing efforts to develop
nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems, the United States briefly
considered air strikes against suspected nuclear facilities or stringent
economic sanctions. Yet both options were rejected out of fear of
triggering a North Korean invasion of the South. Consequently, the
Clinton administration reluctantly entered into negotiations designed to
compel Pyongyang's nuclear disarmament. In October 1994 the
U.S.–North Korea Agreed Framework was signed, committing North
Korea to a freeze on nuclear weapons development and the eventual
destruction of its nuclear reactors. In exchange, the United States,
South Korea, and Japan promised to provide two light-water nuclear
reactors that would be virtually impossible to use to produce nuclear
weapons, along with petroleum to fuel North Korea's conventional
power plants and food assistance to alleviate near-famine conditions.
During the last years of the Clinton administration, relations with
Pyongyang warmed considerably. North Korea claimed that it had suspended
its missile development program pending a permanent agreement, and
Madeleine Albright, now secretary of state, made the first official
American visit to North Korea in 2000. Nevertheless, because this
conditional engagement with North Korea involved reaching agreements
with a regime widely perceived as extremely repressive and
untrustworthy, many in Congress attacked this approach as tantamount to
appeasement and called on George W. Bush to cease negotiations with
Pyongyang. He obliged, announcing that he had no intention of quickly
resuming efforts to reach an agreement on North Korean missile
development.

Interestingly, despite the budding rapprochement between these two
states in the late 1990s, officials in the Clinton administration
repeatedly argued that a national missile defense system needed to be
constructed to protect the United States against nuclear missile attacks
from rogue states such as North Korea. George W. Bush's decision
to end talks with Pyongyang suggested to many observers that he
preferred to pursue national missile defense. To critics of the rogue
state concept, these actions merely reinforced their view that while the
concept had proven to be very successful in garnering domestic support
for punitive measures, the derogatory nature of the term necessarily
complicated efforts to improve relations with states like North Korea.

Similarly, Iran represented another case in which altered circumstances
challenged the rogue-state strategy. The surprise election of Mohammed
Khatemi to the presidency in May 1997 and his subsequent invitation for
a "dialogue between civilizations" led Secretary Albright
to propose a "road map" for normalizing relations.
Conservative Shiite clerics warned Khatemi against engaging the
"Great Satan," but the continued designation of Iran as a
rogue state also contributed to the Clinton administration's
difficulty in responding constructively to positive developments in
Tehran.

The gradual realization that calling states "rogues" might
in some cases have proven counterproductive induced the United States in
June 2000 to drop this term in favor of the less fevered "states
of concern." Secretary Albright emphasized that the change in
name did not imply that the United States now approved of the behavior
of these regimes: "We are now calling these states 'states
of concern' because we are concerned about their support for
terrorist activities, their development of missiles, their desire to
disrupt the international system." Yet State Department officials
acknowledged that the "rogue" term had been eliminated
because some of these states—such as North Korea, Libya, and
Iran—had taken steps to meet American demands and had complained
that they were still being branded with the old label.

Regardless of the terms employed, however, on another level this
post–Cold War strategy of regional containment reflected an
effort by the United States to define acceptable international (and even
domestic) behavior. As a hegemonic state it was, perhaps, appropriate
that Washington attempted to write these rules. Yet it inevitably risked
exposing the United States to charges of arrogance and imperiousness.

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